The Forest Gods' Reign [Published]

Chapter 2: Our First Kill

For three years now the four of us nine-year-olds had been going in and out of the woods without being harmed, other than a couple of scratches from tree branches and undergrowth. We had convinced all of our parents to buy us pocketknives when they finally realized they couldn't keep all four of us out of the forest, but we had mostly been staying out of the way of the monsters hidden in there. Our running and tree-climbing skills were excellent as a result of this. It's safe to say that we had become much more accustomed to the ways of living in the forest, and we had even begun to split up to wander alone, communicating with only expensive waterproof walkie-talkies, which we thought had been the best birthday presents ever. Over the years, we learned to tell direction and approximate time by looking at the shadows and the moss on the north sides of the trees, and we had almost the entire forest mapped out in our heads, which was a hell of a lot of land, mind you. We even knew the hangout areas for the different breeds of monsters, as well as for our friends, the nymphs and satyrs, specifically Pan.

However, Pan wasn't just a satyr, but was also the god of the wild, as I had found out from researching Greek myths online and from recalling mysterious dreams. Strangely, for three whole years, our good friend had never told us himself. Naturally I wondered why Pan was keeping his immortality a secret, so one day, when the subject came up, I decided to ask him.

I was walking alone along one of the paths we had blazed, heading north towards the center of the forest and keeping a close eye out for any movements in the bushes or in the trees. (You never knew when a monster might pop out to kill you, after all.) Suddenly, the black walkie-talkie attatched to a belt loop on my blue jeans crackled to life. I grinned when I heard Zach's breathless voice say, "Connor's making a run for it! Heading south toward the small meadow. Over."

We were in the middle of playing our invented game, which we liked to call reverse hide-and-seek. One of us hid anywhere inside the woods, while the other three of us split up to find the hidden one, communicating only by walkie-talkie. However, the person in hiding also had a walkie-talkie to listen in on the conversation, and he could make a run for it and hide again if one of the seekers was getting too close. One round of our game could take hours to finish, depending on how good someone hid...and how often the seekers had to change their course to avoid being attacked by some mythical creature. That was why I almost never hid - I was the best one of us at hiding, and Zach, Luke and Connor would often give up after a couple of hours.

Quickly, I ran forward, knowing that the small meadow was not too far ahead of where I was, meaning that Connor was running straight towards me from the opposite end of the forest. I knew I could catch him before he tried to hide again, and so I ran on the uneven path as fast as I could, trying not to trip. Breathing hard, I saw the sun just barely shining through the treetops before I ran out into the open, and then Connor was running at me head on, his white shirt and jeans covered in dust and small green leaves. He caught my eye and threw back his head in anguish, knowing he had been caught, and the sun glinted off his sandy blond hair as he slowed to a stop.

Zach ran up behind Connor and stopped next to him, breathing a sigh of relief. I grinned and checked my watch as I joked, "Only took us half an hour. Was Connor hiding on the east side of the hill again?" Zach nodded and laughed, while Connor just frowned at me. But it wasn't my fault he needed to be more creative with his hiding places.

We then sat down on an old fallen pine tree situated at the west edge of the sunny meadow, waiting for Luke to meet us. The last time I had heard from him was when he was in the west part of the woods, searching for Connor near the river, so it took him a while to reach us. Eventually he walked out of the trees behind us, breathing heavily and using a long tree branch he had whittled into a spear as a walking stick.